Lights! Camera! Action! Dartmouth Film Summer School students go into production

This month 9 Foreign Study Programme students from Dartmouth College here as part of the Film Summer School at Screen Academy Scotland, Edinburgh Napier, began to shoot their film projects .

Since they arrived in June the Dartmouth students have worked on a range of projects for three modules that are part of the summer school: Film Festivals taught by Jeffrey Ruoff filmmaker, historian, & professor at Dartmouth College, Music Video Production taught by director Blair Young and Beth Allan from Forest of Black and Digital Cinematography taught by filmmaker Catrionna Macinnes.

For Digital Cinematography, each of the students developed a short film idea, which they then shot and edited into a 1-minute taster film. Three of these were developed into 5 minute shorts; Hiking (written and directed by Haley Taylor), Period (written and directed by Rachel Webb) and Drawn In (written by Spring Yu and directed by Christian Williams). For the Music Video Production module, the students worked with the band Apache Darling to create a music promo for their song Don’t from the album Bubblegum. In addition to this, they worked with Martha Ffion to create a 10-minute EPK documentary for her album Sunday Best (directed by Shiyao Peng) as well as two break-out trailers for the same album.

During the shoots, the students took on a variety of roles to give them a broad taster of the film industry, while those who have strong interests within any one discipline have been encouraged to pursue these. This has led to Maiah Police and Isabelle Parizeau each producing several projects, while Yumi Naruke and Dajee Provitt have taken on a large portion of the editing. The students have been supported on all the shoots by Nasreen Saraei, student intern.

Their Foreign Study Programme will be rounded off on August 16th with a screening of all their projects at Cameo cinema.

Cameo Cinema August 16th10.30am - 12.00.

The screening is open to members of the public but as there are only 25 seats available please email Tanya Oestergaard (t.oestergaard@napier.ac.uk) to put your name on the guest list.

Isabelle Parizeau said:"I'm really grateful for this summer at Screen Academy Scotland - the experience of being thrown directly into production projects was overwhelming at first, but turned out to be so cool and I learned so much more than I feel like I could have from a lecture course. I'm excited to emerge from this program with a real, fun, tangible product that I can point to and say I was part of."

Dajee Provitt said:"My time in Edinburgh has been full of new experiences, new sights, and new people. I am fortunate for the journeys I have had in Scotland and I look forward to returning - hopefully I'll make it to the Isle of Skye next time."